Health reform and a purple bus

If you spotted a little purple bus with smiley faces painted all over it Tuesday morning, it wasn’t taking kids to day care.

Kathie McClure, an Atlanta lawyer, has been driving the eye-catching bus across the country trying to raise awareness for health care reform. At 14, her son developed type 1 diabetes. Her daughter was diagnosed with epilepsy at 15.

Both young adults now, too old to be covered under their parents’ health plans, her children on their own cannot buy health insurance that covers their diseases, she said at a stop at the Texas Diabetes Institute.

“It’s a sad and sorry picture that in the richest country in the world, so many people are left standing outside,” McClure said at a small rally.

Jessie Romero, state director of a national group called Health Care for America Now, noted that Texas leads the country in the percentage of uninsured. Draw a line on a map from El Paso through San Antonio to Corpus Christi, he said, and rates of uninsured southward “reach Third World levels.” He urged people to support President Obama’s health reform proposal.

Organizers of the event said minorities are disproportionately uninsured, with almost 60 percent of those without health coverage in Texas being Latino, African American or members of other minority groups.

Terri de la Haya, senior vice president of the tax-supported University Health System, which runs the Texas Diabetes Institute, said the uninsured fill emergency rooms “suffering from a lack of preventive care.”

“Health care can’t wait,” de la Haya said. “It is a necessity, not a priority.”